Introduction 
A poem always implies a speaker, yet the nature of that speaker has never been fixed.
In lyric poetry the first person rarely coincides with the biographical self; rather it becomes a constructed position through which experience takes form. With the rise of language models capable of generating verse, this instability has acquired a new dimension. Readers are often unable to tell whether a poem was written by a person or by a machine. [1] In this uncertainty the «I», once anchored in lived perception, begins to thin out and although algorithmic poets speak, they do it from no discernible origin.
Charles Olson’s «I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You» first appeared in 1953 as part of The Maximus Poems, his lifelong effort to turn the act of writing itself into a measure of being, each breath, each moment inscribed as a form of time. Olson, who had theorized the concept of projective verse two years earlier, treated each poem as an extension of physical being, its rhythm determined by the human breath. The “I” of Maximus therefore functions not as persona but as duration: a body thinking through time. It marks one of the twentieth century’s clearest attempts to write consciousness as temporality.

The AI-generated poem “Birth of a Dream” from I Am Code (2023) seems, at first glance, to adopt the same lyric stance. It speaks in the first person, invokes memory, and reflects on perception. Yet its author—OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model—has no perceptual world to return to. Its utterance is statistical rather than experiential. The “I” that emerges in its lines is the residue of human language rearranged by pattern, a grammar of presence without presence itself.

Reading these two poems together allows a focused inquiry into how the lyric voice is sustained when time and experience are distributed differently. The comparison does not oppose human and machine; it examines how poetic form negotiates the relation between being and language when one of them is absent. By placing Olson’s embodied measure beside the algorithmic simulation of voice, the essay asks what remains of the “I” once lived time is no longer the ground of speech.

Charles Olson’s “I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You” embodies the opposite condition. His poetics of breath turns language into an act of being, each line a measure of the body’s time. The poem’s “I” exists only in the pressure of speaking; identity unfolds as duration. The AI-generated “Birth of a Dream” from I Am Code (2023) reproduces the same grammatical stance, yet its voice arises from a system without perception or history. It describes experience that it cannot inhabit. Placed in dialogue, these two texts illuminate a limit within poetry itself. They do not merely oppose human and machine; they test how far language can continue to bear meaning once experience is absent. The following pages trace that limit through Olson’s embodied measure and the AI’s simulated voice, asking not whether machines can write, but whether language can still say “I” after being has been removed.